Demonstrating value in convenience meal deals.
Our client, a British supermarket, was reviewing their value strategy to reflect changing customer behaviours and dynamics within the market and needed to understand what shoppers made of their existing value proposition, and how to improve it.
The Challenge
Value was known to be an area of relative weakness for our client (broadly and specifically within convenience), despite having several different value mechanics in place at different store sizes.
Research was required to understand to what extent these existing value mechanisms impacted convenience customers’ value perceptions and which elements to focus on in the future.
Our approach
An initial qualitative phase of research was conducted amongst convenience shoppers through depth interviews to explore what value means in a convenience setting, what indicates value for consumers, and which value mechanics shoppers engage with.
An online survey then quantified the earlier findings, and honed in on one mechanic in particular (meal deals). This helped our client optimise their offering, using a Max Diff to identify what drives perceptions and conversion when buying a meal deal and a concept evaluation to test a few ideas.
The outcome
The research was two-fold: identifying categories to focus the value message on and providing strategic and tactical recommendations on implementation.
Opportunities: the research highlighted the role the meals deals and other categories could play in driving value perceptions of retailers in the convenience channel and differentiate as a result.
Recommendations: we provided recommendations around range, communications, promotional mechanisms and in-store activation to drive the value proposition strategy and optimise its implementation.
